Links for 22nd January 2009

"The press, much like consumers with customer care reps, want to be able to get a hold of corporate PR contacts quickly and easily, otherwise they won't bother doing business. That should be a wake up call for most. Bloggers, meanwhile, all expect us to be present in their spaces and I suspect don't even bother going to our immaculate corporate PR sites. So PR pros increasingly need to be present and available all around."

"… his most exciting project, I'd suggest (based on very little information, to be frank), is Cable City, an incredible 1961 design for a suspended city – what Zenetos called une ville suspendue. The entire metropolis would be hung from cables, a kind of tensional extension of the earth's surface." How does Manaugh *find* this stuff?

"Note that much (but not all) science fiction deals with public and social interactions, not necessarily scientific findings. I’m no scientist by any stretch of the imagination, and while I often pepper my stories with scientific conjectures when appropriate, I don’t think that scientific accuracy isn’t the nexus of what makes SF appealing as an art form. Rather, it is a philosophical texture to the cloth on which the stories are woven. Perhaps it is a realization that people don’t solely act within interior, even narcissistic, spaces–that the high modernist view of humanity as center of the universe is outmoded."

"The moral of the story is that we should be very careful about how we advocate intelligence enhancement technologies, and how these are applied when developed, especially in the immediate days or weeks after the fabrication of the first effective prototypes."

In a certain sense, us pre-Singularity human beings have ontological primacy over post-Singularity persons, because we know for a fact that there was no discrete technological event where asymmetrically superior intelligence was created alongside us, and thus we can be pretty sure we aren’t currently being fooled. (Unless such superintelligence has already been created using supra-technological means, like magic or prayer, which I consider pretty unlikely.) A post-Singularity person can never know for sure, unless they themselves are the entity that first crossed the line into superintelligence.

"It may irritate or confuse some, but there really is no objective reality when it comes to writing. That which was out of fashion in one generation is lauded as genius by the next. That which was popular is now seen as shallow or silly, or both. Sometimes, now, this happens within a few months or a year rather than a decade due to the instantaneous nature of our society." VanderMeer. Some interesting thoughts on Criticism within.

"Fixed-action patterns are common among animals. But what about humans? What if you could use a trigger to set off a desirable sequence of behavior in a potential customer — like saying “yes” to a request you make?"

""Copyright reform in this context is crucial," said Google UK's public policy manager, Richard Sargeant, speaking on a panel at the Oxford Media Convention on the role of ISPs in policing the net. "We look with respect at the system of fair use rights that exists in the US. Europe doesn't have anything similar, which makes it much more difficult for people to see what they can and can't do.""